Robert MacCoun, a psychologist, joined the faculty of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Policy in 1993 and the Boalt faculty in 1999. From 1986 to 1993 he was a behavioral scientist at The RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan private research institution. He has published many studies of jury decision making, alternative dispute resolution, illicit drug dealing, alternative drug laws, harm reduction, gays and lesbians in the military, media biases, and bias in the use and interpretation of research evidence. He is on the National Academy of Sciences committee on drug policy research and analysis, and in 1999 he was a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Table of Contents

00:15 — How do you see the relationship between scientific research and drug policy?

05:34 — What role does the media play in public drug policy debates?

07:50 — What’s up with the drug policy reform movement these days?

11:36 — How does our scientific understanding of addiction impact the legalization debate?

17:31 — What are your thoughts about the California ballot initiative to legalize and tax marijuana?

28:10 — What are the current trends with regard to marijuana and public opinion?

32:44 — Can you tell us how you got involved in the intersection between psychology and the law?

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Madeline Fisher, an expert on the psychology of nutrition, recently wrote an interesting piece that connects the media’s portrayal of women’s body image with eating disorders. We excerpt the piece below.

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As France’s parliament considers a landmark bill that would outlaw media images glamorizing the extremely thin, psychology researchers are reporting some of the most definitive findings yet on how these images affect women.

In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher Shelly Grabe and psychology professor Janet Hyde describe a sweeping analysis of 77 previous studies involving more than 15,000 subjects. In it, they found that exposure to media depicting ultra-thin actresses and models significantly increased women’s concerns about their bodies, including how dissatisfied they felt and their likelihood of engaging in unhealthy eating behaviors, such as excessive dieting.

Although on one level the results seem obvious, Grabe believes many people still resist the idea that a societal influence, like the media, can have a real impact on how women view themselves. When individual experiments have found this relationship in the past, she explains, critics have often dismissed them for focusing on groups of particularly body-conscious women, such as college students, or exposing test subjects to unusually racy photos.

Grabe and Hyde, in contrast, analyzed data from every well-designed study on the topic they could find, thus avoiding much of this criticism.

“We’ve demonstrated that it doesn’t matter what the exposure is, whether it’s general TV watching in the evening, or magazines, or ads showing on a computer,” says Grabe. “If the image is appearance-focused and sends a clear message about a woman’s body as an object, then it’s going to affect women.”

The effect also appears to be growing. The researchers’ analysis reveals that, on average, studies conducted in the 2000s show a larger influence of the media on women’s body image than do those from the 1990s, says Grabe.

“This suggests that despite all our efforts to teach women and girls to be savvy about the media and have healthy body practices, the media’s effect on how much they internalize the thin ideal is getting stronger,” she says.

The results are troubling because recent research has established body dissatisfaction as a major risk factor for low self-esteem, depression, obesity, and eating disorders, such as bulimia. At the same time, women’s displeasure with their bodies has become so common that it’s now considered normal, says Grabe. She hopes that wider recognition of the media’s role will encourage people to see the issue as a societal one, rather than as a problem of individual women as it’s viewed now.

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So, what’s the answer? The French government may try to control the media, but don’t women also need to learn to be a little less concerned with their looks?

Grabe replies that the issue lies not with our attraction to images of beauty or with women’s desire to emulate them, but with what we’ve come to define as beautiful: bodies that are unnaturally and unhealthily thin.

“I want to stress that it’s totally normal for women to want to be attractive,” says Grabe. “But what’s happening in our society is that many women are striving toward something that’s not very realistic or obtainable, and that leads to a lot of health consequences.